FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT QUARTET - PAGE 2

Fine jazz has a way of turning up in the unlikeliest places, such as the Empty Bottle, a rock club on North Western Avenue. Recently, the Empty Bottle launched a Wednesday-night jazz series that looked promising on paper and is getting better with each installment. Though the audience turnout has been uneven, it should be just a matter of time before listeners discover the club's intriguing jazz lineup. If last week's solo set by percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Jerome Cooper had its ups and downs, Wednesday's show by a quartet of young Chicago players proved consistently appealing.

Community Park will swing, rock and be-bop beginning Tuesday as the Park District debuts its "Starlight Series," four consecutive evenings of free open-air concerts. "This is something the board had identified as an objective for us to accomplish," said Kerry Hays, Park District director. He added that the district hopes to offer concerts each summer and eventually be able to raise, with community support, enough funds to buy a show wagon. The bands will perform this year on a show wagon borrowed from another district, Hays said.

At the end of Harry Connick Jr.'s first set Wednesday at the Green Mill, he launched into a monologue that seemed to revolve around the Billboard jazz charts and men's jewelry. The capacity crowd of 100 ate it up, but his instrumental skill was more impressive than his stand-up routine. Connick used the easygoing delivery and his own mannered piano accompaniment that helped pave the way for such younger stars as Norah Jones. In the last few years Connick has departed from the inclination toward nostalgia-tinged pop that had made him a household name.

It started as a simple idea: A quartet of Glen Ellyn high school vocalists would spend Valentine's Day delivering personal serenades in the spirit of the holiday. The teens, known as "The Quad," figured maybe a dozen Glenbard South High School classmates would purchase the $5 romantic four-part harmonies for their steadies. Instead, they received a barrage of requests from inside and outside of the school. (Off-campus crooning costs $10.) Sixty-two requests to be exact, and some of them unexpected.

The great French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote his "Quartet for the End of Time" in a Nazi stalag in 1941, when Europe was immersed in war. Instead of evoking gloom and doom a la Shostakovich, its music paints a dazzling apocalyptic vision of a mighty angel beckoning mankind to spiritual fulfillment. Now, at the millennial cusp and in the midst of a Messiaen rediscovery, this visionary work has gained renewed relevance. It was the main attraction in the Orion Ensemble's concert Monday night in Roosevelt University's Ganz Hall.

As expected, Levi Kreis, Rob Lyons, Eddie Clendening and Lance Guest are headed to Broadway with the Chicago hit "Million Dollar Quartet." The official announcement came Thursday. And when they arrive at the Nederlander Theatre in March (opening night is April 11), they'll find some new co-stars: Elizabeth Stanley and Hunter Foster. Stanley (recently seen in Chicago atop "Xanadu") will play the role of Dyanne, aka Elvis' girlfriend. Foster, known especially for "Urinetown," plays Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records.

Like many formidable jazz musicians, bassist Henry Grimes dropped out of music before making a triumphal return. But because his self-imposed exile lasted several decades--after a creative peak in the 1960s--his comeback has generated considerable attention and hyperbole from admirers. Over the weekend, Chicago listeners had a rare chance to judge for themselves the value of Grimes' art, apart from the narrative of his sometimes turbulent life. If the man's playing Friday night at HotHouse proved stylistically adventurous and technically strong, it was the work of the quartet that he convened for the occasion that made the most vivid impression.

These days, it seems, if you want to perform for the first lady, it helps if you're from Park Ridge. Of course, it also helps if you've got some talent in the music department. The music department from Hillary Rodham Clinton's alma mater, that is. The Maine South High School Marching Band started the trend in January, hitting the high notes of the first-ever "First Lady March," as the presidential motorcade whizzed past them on Inauguration Day. And on Sunday, Fourtune, an a cappella jazz quartet made up of Maine South High School choir alumni, is scheduled to serenade Mrs. and President Clinton at the First Family's first Christmas party in Washington, D.C. "It'll be nice for Hillary to see some of her alumni succeeding professionally," said Fourtune member Jim Gnaster, 32, a 1979 Maine South graduate.

As longtime banjo player Greg Cahill sees it, these are pretty good times to be a bluegrass musician. "Getting radio airplay is still an uphill battle," said Cahill, who recently recorded his 11th album with the Special Consensus, the bluegrass band he founded 26 years ago. "But a lot of staunch country music fans are coming over to bluegrass, and a lot of kids inundated by electronic pop think bluegrass is something new and cool. "We aren't able to stay at the Ritz when we tour.

They may not make `em anymore exactly like the old Ink Spots quartet. But some spinoff groups are stirring up memories with able imitations of the rich, warm, romantic crooning style the Spots introduced more than 50 years ago. One of these, the Chicago-based Nate Williams Ink Spots, claims "direct descent" from the mother group formed in 1934 by Ivory "Deke" Watson and three fellow janitors at the Paramount Theater in New York. The product of a musical family from Jackson, Miss.